A certain poet once said there was a special kinship between thinking and thanking, denken and danken. I never understood what this oracular wordplay meant until I began working on this book. Therefore deepest and highest padeuteria to my teachers at Princeton: Leonard Barkan, Jeff Dolven, Anthony Grafton, Simone Marchesi, and Alexander Nehamas.
To compare the great with the small, my favorite poet once said:
Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.
This book was conceived in Rome, written in Pisa and Princeton, revised innumerably in Stanford, New Haven, and London, and finished in Singapore. During so many moments I felt I was gathering all my friends together far and wide. At Princeton, Hans Aarsleff, Rosa Andújar, Kenneth Chong, Andrew Ford, Leslie Geddes, Adam Gitner, Matthew Harrison, Christian Kaesser, John Logan, Joe Moshenska, François Rigolot, Susan Stewart, Nigel Smith, Julianne Werlin, Leah Whittington, and Tom Zanker were all so formative to my Bildung. At Pisa, Lina Bolzoni, George Corbett, David Collier, Carlo Ginzburg, Lisa Marie Mignone, Fabio Pagani, Eugenio Refini, and Mauro Scarabelli made me feel like one of the Normalisti. At Stanford, Dan Edelstein, Catherine Flynn, Phillip Horky, Marisa Galvez, Roland Greene, Sepp Gumbrecht, Robert Pogue Harrison, Josh Landy, Stephen Orgel, and Ben Wiebracht all shone upon me the beneficent rays of the California sunshine. In the wider republic of letters, Christopher D. Johnson has been a stalwart conference companion and friend. In New Haven, David Kastan, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Howard Bloch, John Rogers, Annabel Patterson, David Quint, Lawrence Manley, Christopher Wood, and the staff at the Whitney Humanities Center welcomed me during the bracing New England seasons. In the perennial summer of Singapore, I’m grateful to Pericles Lewis, Rajeev Patke, Mira Seo, Jane M. Jacobs, Petrus Liu, Robin Hemley, and Emanuel Mayer for the new little community of Rome and Athens that we are building. And we remember Barney Bate (1960–2016), the first ancestor of Yale–NUS College. A long and fruitful conversation with Haun Saussy on a March day in London made the publication a real possibility.
I thank Robert Pogue Harrison for his invitation to appear on his radio program, Entitled Opinions, to discuss the project. The Yale English Department’s early modern working group, Pomerium, led by the great David Kastan, gave vigorous critiques to two chapters, and I’m grateful to Carla Baricz, Brad Holden, Sam Fallon, Tessie Prakas, Michael Komorowski, and Aaron Pratt. In an earlier iteration, John Logan read every word of it. When the manuscript was inching toward completion, Ben Wiebracht, Brad Holden, and Clio Doyle read it. At Fordham, two anonymous readers offered brilliant feedback. Tom Lay has been the very model of an editor: encouraging, insightful, timely. Tim Roberts as managing editor, Judith Hoover as copyeditor, and Steven Moore as indexer have all been superb during the production process. Haun and Lazar Fleishmann are terrific series editors.
Now and forever, Melissa Kwok makes my fragments whole again. Last, to my parents. For the first poet said:
父兮生我，母兮鞠我。
欲报之德，昊天罔极。
My father—he begot me; my mother—she nursed me;
I wish to repay their bounty, the vast sky has no boundary.
So much more to write, so much more to say. . . . But for now, ever more thanks to all.